The Chesterfield football history resource

In a quiet corner of St. Paul's Cathedral is a memorial
stone to Sir Christopher Wren, its architect, which bears the legend "If
you seek his monument, look around you." A similar thing might not go
amiss at The Proact Stadium as a memorial to Barrie Hubbard, three times a Chairman of
the Chesterfield Football Club, who passed away in December 2015.

Born in Chesterfield in 1939, Barrie was a lifelong fan
who lived the fan's dream of bossing his own club. He joined the board on June
3, 1983, with the club just days from closure. Spiralling debts were a
monstrous hangover from the Cox era: nowadays a club would just drop into
administration, but that wasn't an option in 1983 and with the club facing
oblivion, Hubbard came in. Like a number of his predecessors on the board,
Hubbard had interests in a local printing firm. He wasn't fabulously wealthy
but had the knowledge and experience to make a business successful, and he
approached everything with the perspective of the supporter that he was.

Money-wise, Mike Watterson provided the lion's share -
£91,000 - to save the club but could not put his name to that fact, since he
was on the board at Derby, and it was forbidden to be a director at more than
one club. The shares were to be bought under the banner of Transworld
Publications, a company that the pair owned, but in the event, they were
registered in Hubbard's name, causing a wound between the two men that would
never properly be healed.

If Watterson provided the money, Hubbard certainly gave as
much in enthusiasm, vision and sheer hard work. On the playing front, the club
bounced back from relegation in 1983 to take the Fourth Division championship
two years later, with Hubbard's appointment of John Duncan to the manager's being
particularly successful. Off the field, however, directors came and went in an
unsettling manner.

With the championship secured in the summer of 1985, Barrie
Hubbard announced that a "prestigious super-stadium" was to rise,
phoenix-like, from the crumbling ruins of Saltergate, providing three sides of
seating among accommodation for 20,000 fans, all under cover. It was to be paid
for by a new national football pool called "Top Score," which quickly
proved to be a dismal flop. The redevelopment, like so many more to come, was
abandoned.

Just before the start of the 1985-86 season Hubbard was summarily
removed from the board of directors and replaced as Chairman by Ken Unwin,
although Mike Watterson remained as the money man. Rumblings were heard from
other board members about an alleged autocratic style on the Chairman's part,
but one man's autocrat is another's "firm hand on the tiller," and
Hubbard's hands-on approach had delivered success in an affordable manner.

Several others tried the club's Chair for size before Barrie
returned to it in November 1987. In the meantime the club had slipped
alarmingly towards crisis again, as attendances throughout football fell away
in response to negative play, hooliganism, poor facilities and a troubling
political and economic climate that saw the game's traditional working class
foundations crumble. Again, another man - this time, the former Sheffield
United and Mansfield Town director, Norton Lea - provided the greater share of
the finance, but Hubbard's presence at the head of Lea's consortium brought it instant
credibility among the fan base and ensured that the take-over was widely welcomed.
Lea eventually took the Chair in January 1991 but Hubbard stayed and, in
contrast to some of his past fellow-directors, remained a loyal lieutenant to
the man in charge, acting as a buffer between the rather aloof-looking Lea and
the fans.

With Lea in the Chair and Hubbard supporting him, the club
enjoyed a period of success that has not been repeated, following a play-off
win in 1994-5 with three successive top-half finishes in League One, while
reaching an FA Cup semi-final - all with Hubbard's original choice for manager,
John Duncan, back at the helm.

Hubbard's public support of Lea won him few new friends
among the supporters, but those close to Barrie knew him better than to take
seriously the occasional threat to pull the plug, seeing these as no more than
badly-worded pleas for support. When Lea failed to deliver a new stadium and
abolished the family stand while whacking up prices and selling players at the
start of a catastrophic 1999-2000 season, supporters began calling for their
resignations. Sooner than they might have expected, perhaps, the fans got what
they wished for.

Barrie was again removed from the board in 2000, this time
by something of a fait accompli, as Lea sold the club to the convicted
fraudster, Darren Brown. As before, he kept his own counsel as events unfolded,
but was around to offer advice to those who prepared to pick up the pieces as
Brown's corruption became plain to see. The Chesterfield Football Supporters
Society rescued the club in April 2000 and sought to run it under a
fan-ownership model but were unable to raise the sort of sums needed to sustain
the club and develop its immediate future. After a couple of years of gradually
worsening struggle the CFSS came to an agreement with Barrie that saw his
return to the Chair.

Hubbard's priority was the stadium. While he was once a
proponent of redeveloping Saltergate, its steep decline in later years and its
restrictive geographical location had convinced Barrie that the future now lay
elsewhere. Having seen off a challenge to his leadership that, if successful,
would have thrown the club's limited resources behind redevelopment, Hubbard
worked tirelessly to secure his club's future. It was to his immense personal
frustration that the project crawled, tortoise-like, towards its conclusion,
but countless obstacles had to be overcome - not least, the question of
finance. Barrie completed a remarkable day's work when he managed to persuade
Dave Allen to buy into the project, and he must have seen that, inevitably,
there would come a time when the money-man wanted to be in full control, since
this had happened in both previous periods that he occupied the Chair. When
considering Barrie's motives for involvement in the club, we would do well to
remember that there must have been a moment when he realised that, in order to
safeguard the future of the club, he would have to give up control of it.
Still, he went ahead.

Barrie resigned from the club's board of directors for the
last time in May 2012 to become the club's Life President, and he continued to
attend matches right up to the end. Where does he stand, in the ranks of
Chesterfield Chairmen? Harold Shentall enjoyed a longer term of office and took
the club up to the second tier of English football twice, while delivering a
completely re-developed ground, but at a great financial cost that eventually
led to relegation to the Fourth Division. Harry Cropper was among a group that
formed the current club in 1919 as the Chesterfield Municipal FC, but Hubbard
more or less started from scratch too, in 1983.

Will we ever see his like again? Possibly, but it must be
considered unlikely. High-level professional football is no longer the stamping-ground
for a local, benevolent businessman, in it only for the love of the club he
protects; it is all about money. We've landed on our feet with Dave Allen but
had to endure Darren Brown before that. All we can hope, perhaps, is that
Barrie Hubbard's successors value the past as much as they look to the future.
Having come up through the ranks, Barrie realised this, sharing the same ambitions
and perspectives as the ordinary supporter, and this made him the great
chairman that he was.